Fargo loves a good misdirect. Remember the bit in this week’s episode — “The Useless Hand,” the penultimate episode of the show’s stellar fifth season — where Dorothy opens up all the gas valves on Roy Tillman’s stove? You anticipate fireworks that never come. Roy smells the gas, stops one of his dipshit minions from lighting a cigarette, turns off the stove, has the boys open all the doors and windows, boom, problem solved.
All the gambit manages to do is tip Roy off that Dorothy has been in the house, which he honestly might have eventually guessed anyway. (He’s very quick to figure out she’s hiding someplace she thinks they wouldn’t expect.) And he would have figured that out the moment he went up to his bedroom and found his wife knocked out cold — not that the sight gives him a second’s thought of stopping his hunt to help the woman when he does stumble across her. Not our Roy!
The point is that neither expected outcome, neither the worst nor the best, comes to pass. The gas doesn’t make or break Dorothy’s escape attempt. She doesn’t kill Roy with it, and she doesn’t get killed because of it. (It’s a close call in the end, but again, it would have been a close call regardless.) The show just wants you to think something might happen. Creator Noah Hawley, who wrote this episode, constructed the show’s entire approach to action and suspense around allowing the viewer’s mind to spin as fast as it can for as long as it can before he finally lowers the boom.
Later in the episode, state trooper Witt Farr warns the task force of feds and state cops he’s assembled to rescue Dorothy not to shoot at her even if she appears armed and dangerous, which she almost certainly will. “This story,” he tells them, “will not end with us crushing the victim with the helping hand.” Puts an idea into your head, doesn’t it? Doesn’t beat you over the head with it, but slides it right in there nonetheless. And there it will stay for one more week. You can rotate it in your mind like a cube if you want. I’m pretty sure Noah Hawley wants you to.
Fargo has little time for the innate nobility of victims. Its colony of benevolent Lindas was a fantasy. Dorothy isn’t noble because she was victimized, she’s noble because she’s noble, because she’s a good person who does good things for the people she cares about, and even for people she doesn’t. Just compare and contrast with Gator, also a victim of Roy’s, who turns out little better than Roy himself, just far less effectual. (And, thanks to Ole Munch, blinded.)
And Sheriff Roy Tillman’s current missus, Karen (that name can’t be a coincidence), is a small-minded shit who sees in Dorothy not a victim or a prisoner — despite the fact that she’s literally in chains — but a hated ex-girlfriend. I’m sorry if the comparison is over the top, but it reminds me of watching Jonathan Glazer’s astonishing film The Zone of Interest and watching Rudolph and Hedwig Höss regard the greatest act of mass murder in human history as a career opportunity. Not even her daughters suffering at Roy’s hands, as they inevitably will do if they haven’t already, shakes her from her desire to be the trophy wife for Sexually Attractive Joe Arapaio. Fine, lady, have it your way.
Fargo is interested in the supernatural. So are the Coen Brothers, the show’s muses. Ole Munch reads as a combination of many Coen characters, both the “officially” supernatural ones and the ones who are merely so singularly strange as to appear supernatural. I won’t spoil your Coen Brothers filmography experience by spilling the beans on who is who.
I don’t have anything particularly deep to say about Ole, beyond that he’s a fantastically entertaining presence in this episode. He deals out rough justice to Gator, who (perhaps a bit too fortuitously for the justice-minded viewer) turns out to have a direct line to child predators. He leads the blinded failson on a leash to the Tillman compound, where he dismisses the guy as merely Roy’s now-useless severed hand and thrusts him at his father, punking them both out effortlessly before disappearing into the mist. He resurfaces to dispatch Roy’s goons like the Predator, then rescue and rearm Dorothy, who’d been hiding out with the corpse of Danish Graves. “Now the tiger is free,” he says around the mouthful of tar it always sounds like he’s trying to enunciate behind, before walking off into the mist-set. So ends a loose end.
Fargo is interest in parenthood. When Munch returns Gator to Roy, Roy dismisses him as useless in so many words, even as the younger man cries for “Daddy” like the wounded child he is at heart. It’s brutal, and Joe Keery’s slackjawed reaction and perplexed “…Dad?” sells that brutality.
But where it really got me, where it made me cry, was when Lorraine Lyon told the kidnapped and terrified Dot over the phone that “No daughter of mine is going down on the one-yard line.” Emphasis mine, but only kind of. The moment you hear that word you know what it means to both women. It feels so gender-essentialist to say that it’s usually moments of regret or tenderness from older men that move me in art, not older women. But good lord did this pack a wallop.
Fargo gave us officewear Indira Olmstead, for which I can only say thank you. Goodness gracious.
Fargo gave us the apotheosis of Sheriff Roy Tillman. Yes, he tosses off one fascist bon mot after another, from “We’ll show these godless huns how a patriot dies a-singin’!” to “Go and live…or stay and die.” Meanwhile he’s too scared of his own feelings to comfort his maimed child or murder his abused ex-wife himself.
Fargo is a very good show.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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